please review fix for (FP) problem

[dhobbes]

No description provided.

[cyberfox]

Greetings,
This is an interesting pull request, but I'd need to see it without all the debugging statements and extraneous changes.

-- Morgan

[jdlx]

Dear Morgan.. i assume the whole parsing takes place on standard (read as non-mobile) ebay pages, is this correct?
If so: i don't know if that'd be a viable option, however the mobile pages have way less DOM to parse, and as far as i know are country independent.. wouldn't that be a way to ged rid of - or at least reduce - the neverending "ebay changes broke the parser" rat race?

[cyberfox]

@jdlx Yes; my recollection when I looked at the eBay Mobile pages (a VERY long time ago) was that they were not predictable URLs built off of just the item number. In other words they had some internal mapping between item numbers and their pages, and it was not straightforwardly navigable.

This was prior to the iPhone, however, to give some context about when I last looked at their mobile pages. :) The mobile pages were also served by some other company, who eBay had contracted to provide mobile services.

I should look again and see what they look like these days.

[jdlx]

Morgan, yet another idea regarding the parsing..

How about offloading the parsing definitions in distinct files which JB can update on demand.. alike virus definitions. This way any havoc caused by ebay changes would require just a fresh set of definitions and not a re-compile of the whole app..

I'd imagine a per country dir containing a def file per page (login,bid,myebay..) which JB could check against some online source - could even be Github via it's API - for updates.

Futhermore: to enable ad hoc patches from knowledgeable community members, have a option in JB's settings to change the source URL from the standard vendor to some alternate contrib URL. This would take some serious pressure from U regarding the updates.. while users could get fast ad hoc patches and a yet again working JB, you'd get a nice grace period to review and finally merge patches into your vendor defintions..